The latest tech advice for how to manage your nonprofit organization

The Top 7 Free and Open Source Membership Management Software Products

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UPDATE 10/21/2016: We’ve updated this article with a new solution since the post originally went live.

No one can argue—getting things for free is awesome!

Whether it’s a brand new car or just a Chipotle burrito, free stuff makes you happy. So what if you could get something you need and would actually invest money in for free? Maybe something like…membership management software?

I’ve put together a list of the best free membership management software solutions out there for you to compare and contrast.

Get a FREE Copy of the Top 20 Membership Management Software

Wild Apricot is web-based software for small associations and non-profits to help manage membership, website, events and other activities. It runs through a web browser without needing to install anything on your local computer. Their focus is small organizations and they have a mix of free and paid options. Their free option is free up to 50 members. They charge $25/month when you get to 250 members.

Pros/cons

Wild Apricot offers custom domains and integrates with QuickBooks as well. It has good support (and has some great resources and user reviews), even with the free option, and is very customizable. However, if your organization grows rapidly you will quickly outgrow the free version and have to pay monthly fees.

Silkstart is software for helping associations better grow their membership and promote their causes. They have a platform that helps organizations accept payments online for dues, events, and a host of other things. They are SaaS and are free up to 50 dues-paying members. They charge $250/month when you get up to 1,000 members.

Pros/cons

In addition to all the basic membership management features, Silkstart has dashboards that help associations see how their organization operates over time, they have early-bird ticket creation, and a strong focus on events, and they have a great blog for tips and advice. Their strong focus on events and also the ability to see the success of your organization long term is great for your business. However, they were just started in 2010, so consider the pros (often greater innovation and usability) and cons (less of a track record) that come with new businesses.

GroupSpaces provides technology to manage membership, activities, and promotion online through a free group website. Their main customers are mostly student groups, social groups, and small organizations. They are free up to 50 members, and they begin charging $7.99/month when you get to 200 members.

Pros/cons

GroupSpaces provides ticketing, the ability to create a custom domain or integrate with your current website, as well as manage events. However, they have a very simple back end and they do not integrate with QuickBooks or any other accounting package. It is also worth noting that we attempted to reach them several times with no success. This may be an indication of low customer service levels.

MemberPlanet is web-based software that provides everything for you to manage your group in one place. It’s used by a wide variety of groups, and is completely free up to 200 members. They begin charging $4.99/month when you get over 200 members.

Pros/cons

MemberPlanet has donation campaigns, integrates with QuickPay, has online surveys, and has different types of support available among quite a few other options. However, at over 200 members there is a monthly fee, and MemberPlanet was just launched last year, making it another new company like Silkstart.

BigTent is an online platform that allows users to manage multiple groups all in one place. They provide a secure network where members can interact with one another and stay informed and involved in their groups’ activities. Similar to GroupSpaces, the majority of their customers are like-minded groups, social clubs, small organizations, and the like. BigTent is free for any number of members, but does charge a per transaction fee of 4.9% and $0.49 if you need to take payments through it.

Pros/cons

BigTent offers payment processing and unlimited free photo and file sharing as well as more general functionality to manage your membership. BigTent is great for small groups/organizations with a small budget and not many people or the time to manage complicated software—they have a customer support page to help you through it yourself. It’s very basic and simple to use and doesn’t require a lot of maintenance. However, they don’t give you a custom domain, and they also charge transaction fees.

ClubMaster is an open source membership management system written in PHP. Its goal is to make a complete membership solution that is free for all, and contains all enterprise features. It’s licensed under a Beerware license (a very relaxed license), so you can do everything that you want with the software.

Pros/cons

ClubMaster, in addition to the inherent customizability of being open source, includes shop/order management and integrates with QuickPay. That said, it also means they have very limited support (there is a mailing list for support questions) so you may run into problems with installing and running the software unless you or someone else in your organization is tech savvy.

MembersGear is a free open source membership software that provides you with all the tools to easily administer a membership or subscription web business. It’s PHP software that allows you to integrate and configure your own design with their management system.

Pros/cons

MembersGear supports member affiliate programs, unlimited groups, and product selling. It’s free and downloadable, and is ideal for managing a subscription-based membership website. However, similar to ClubMaster, support, although free, is limited given that it’s open-source, and unless you’re tech savvy you may encounter some problems.

Admidio is a basic open source management software available on SourceForge that focuses on general management, and which can be applied to membership and event management. Although basic on the surface, the features of Admidio range from membership list creation and management to integration with online postings and advertising.

Pros/Cons

Admidio covers many of the key features of membership management software. It can keep your lists updated, integrates with Excel and can export in .pdf format, and it allows for posting online and advertising to your member lists.

However, it does not come packaged with many of the bells and whistles included with other software options, such as Wild Apricot. It does not include payment processing, automatic renewals, or accounting. You may want to consider additional software to supplement these functions.

Tendenci is a much more in-depth open source software solution, covering the major features of membership management, such as payments, membership lists, donations, and email integration. The full version of the software are available for download on GitHub.

Pros/Cons

Tendenci is feature- and option-rich, to be sure. However, as with all open source software, it does require some technical expertise to get it up and running. That said, if you don’t want to handle implementation yourself, hosting and support are available as packages purchased on the Tendenci website.

Who doesn’t love penguins? Already Zenbership has me hooked with their clean website and quality presentation. This presentation doesn’t end with their website since their software also offers a clean, modern, and easy-to-understand user interface. Zenbership not only offers your standard membership management features, but also includes free event management, social media marketing, and email subscription options.

Pros/Cons

Zenbership has to be one of the cleanest and expansive open-source membership management programs I have come across. However this quality comes at a price. The software itself is free, however installation isn’t simple and requires web-hosting on your own Linux based servers. If you are savvy with technology, then Zenbership won’t present any issues, however for those who aren’t as savvy, Zenbership does offer help for a price.

Honorable Mentions

Other open source solutions to consider would be CiviCRM and Ebase, which I discuss in further detail here.

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About the Author

Leah Readings

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Leah Readings is a Software Analyst for Capterra, a company that connects buyers and sellers of business software. She specializes in church management software along with several other software directories. When she’s not helping software buyers, she is, among other things, reading, writing, and spending time with her family and friends.

Comments

Comment by Ed Schipul on January 13, 2014 at 5:57 pm

Leah,

I have one more for your list. Open Source Tendenci. Tendenci is not new, but we’re newly FOSS/GPL as of 2011.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the programmers behind Tendenci – The Open Source Membership Management Software. I haven’t posted here before so if a programmer who contributes to a GPL project shouldn’t post feel free to delete my comment.)

Tendenci is The Open Source Membership Management Software platform. Why? Because we love nonprofits and seeing people change the world! Tendenci includes full Membership Management functionality as well as a huge set of utilities specific to non-profits, NGOs and associations in particular. Being GPL / FOSS you are free to download, extend, build out, host with the provider of your choice in the country of your choice. For free. No catches or gotchas.

And while I originally wrote the core of Tendenci in 2001, it was built out by a team of programmers to meet the needs of currently 400+ clients. Then to become truly GPL, we took the leap and it has been rewritten from the ground up starting in 2009 to use Python/Django/Postgres on Linux. It takes a global village.

Full source code is available at github.com/tendenci/tendenci and there is a demo at demo.tendenci.com.

What makes it different is Tendenci is written in Python, not-PHP. And we still benefit from the knowledge of serving and learning from the community for over 12 years. (It just took us a while to go open source as we had to do a rewrite. Sorry for the delay!)

Lastly, built on the Django framework, Tendenci is multilingual with translations crowdsourced through transifex. And we are working on the donor management software portion so people will finally have a REAL open-source alternative to the proprietary “vendor lockin” and the Blackbaud juggernaut. Join us on github!

Our business model? For people looking for hosted, similar to Drupal and WordPress, we do offer a hosted version with a 30 day trial. But that is optional, unlike the proprietary vendors in the NPO space. And in some countries, we don’t even advise you to host anyplace you can’t control your server. So take control and enjoy the freedom. #tendenci #peace

Comment by Leah Merrill on January 17, 2014 at 3:51 pm

Hi Ed,

Thank you for adding that! We will definitely keep Tendenci on our radar now for future membership management articles.

Comment by Domenic on April 3, 2014 at 8:27 am

I am looking for software to manage an online ten week course. Sign up and pay then deliver the link and prevent others for using it. I’m not sure what you call it. Also I would like to have members subscribe for a small fee each year. Do you have that kind of software?

i m part of a small social group based in india and can we use these softwares in india too?

Comment by Ulrik Schoth on June 19, 2014 at 8:43 am

Hi Leah,

in our little sports club (about 100 members) we have been using the open source solution “Admidio” for quite a while. And we are really happy with it after all these years trying to keep an Excel file with all the member data up to date…

Leah or anyone else – do you know if any of these or which of these allow you to embed a membership directory into an existing website? I use weebly for our site. If it would give me the HTML code for a membership directory, I could put that in our site.

Comment by Gerben Besselink on October 26, 2014 at 7:26 am

Hi,

I am looking for a membershipsystem for a row club including a reservation system for the rowboats (1 thru 5 users per boat).

Thanks Gerben

Comment by Michael Hoffmann on October 27, 2014 at 6:45 am

You may want to keep the list (principally quite useful) up to date.

SilkStart is no longer free for up to 250 users, they now charge $75/month for more than 50. An amount I personally consider ludicrous for small organisations or clubs. We have about 60 members and I would be crucified if I tried to pay nearly $1000 per year simply to manage out little club. In fact most of the ones listed seem to now charge significantly more than you state with lower membership thresholds for free usage.

It’s not your doing and not your fault, but it does leave a bit of a nasty “bait&switch” taste in ones mouth.

Comment by Leah Readings on October 31, 2014 at 3:14 pm

Michael,

Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll go through the post and make sure that we get all of the systems that are listed updated with the correct pricing information.

Thanks!

Comment by Pradeep Kumar on November 11, 2014 at 4:41 am

I am looking for a membership management software which can have currency decimals up to 3 places. Can anyone point to any?

Comment by Peggy McGeady on November 19, 2014 at 12:24 pm

I have been trying to contact MembersGear support and keep getting this message: “Sorry your support e-mail didn’t sent. Please try again later. ”
They offer online demos of their products, but the logins they give don’t work: admin/admin for the admin area and demo/demo for the customer area don’t work.
Are they still in business? Thanks…

Comment by Brent Vondale on November 22, 2014 at 12:57 am

I am a business consultant looking for software (with hosting capability) for my website that can create individual client accounts and profiles so that I can post and update progress of their assignments.

Comment by Nigel Page on December 3, 2014 at 5:12 am

Can you recommend a good group management solution for a small sporting club with under 200 members but with several small clubs under the main club. We need to be able to send group emails to all members or selected smaller groups as well as been able to create and sell tickets to events. We currently use groupspaces and are finding it cumbersome.

Comment by Dan Carroll on December 18, 2014 at 1:03 pm

Hi Leah,

I will be opening up a physical therapy facility in the near future, and plan on offering fitness memberships to discharged patients. Can you recommend a free membership software package that will allow me to track patient’s accounts? I basically need to simply know when their membership expires. Other functions such as POS, inventory, etc are unnecessary.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

Comment by JP Medved on December 30, 2014 at 3:53 pm

Hi Dan,

Wild Apricot is one of the most straightforward ones on the list. It might be able to do what you need without unnecessary addons.

Nigel,

BigTent might be a good fit if you have multiple locations like that, however if you’d prefer a more one-on-one consultation, contact us here and we can get you set up with a phone call to figure out some options based on your needs (totally free):

Hi Leah,
Our non-profit support and social club has been using BigTent for a few years now. It has several limitations that we’d like to overcome in another management system. Specifically, we’d like for the admin to be able to add members if the members are unable to do this themselves. We’d like to be able to update members’ information. Members would like to sort for a subset of members such as people who live near them or families with similar aged children. We like a direct link to our Facebook page. Some members dont want to be on Facebook but want to follow our conversations. We’d like posting of discussions and events to be more user friendly. We use evite and paypal for invitations and ticket/fee payments and would prefer one source and no or lower processing fees.

Most importantly, we want our members to only need to go to one location to access all the club information. Historically we have had our public website (hosted by Bluehost and created in Weebly), membership database (BigTent), most active conversation strings (Facebook) and event management (Evite, BigTent, Facebook, PayPal). Too many places to follow.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Terri

Comment by Mark Sans on January 29, 2015 at 12:16 pm

Great article and with very helpful tips. I decided to sign up to MembersGear.com based on your recommendation and so far loving the software, thank you!

Comment by Jamie T on February 12, 2015 at 6:37 pm

You forgot CiviCRM, easily the most mature, robust, and featured open-source AND free product available. http://www.civicrm.org

Comment by rok jenkos on March 6, 2015 at 2:15 am

None of these are free, only freemium-alike. You should change your scammy title.

Comment by JP Medved on March 6, 2015 at 12:38 pm

Hi Terri, you may want to consider something like Wild Apricot with their custom domains to solve your centralization questions.

Rok, at least two of the above are totally free given that they are open source software, and the others all have both free and paid options. It’s entirely possible to use any of the solutions mentioned in this article and not spend a dime.

They offer a free trial and they can help you centralize your access with all the features that they offer. Their portal for members is fully customizable and can be integrated directly into your site.

Comment by Hannah H on April 1, 2015 at 4:22 pm

Has anyone ever used sales force for member management? If so how did that work for you?

Comment by Jack J on June 26, 2015 at 3:43 pm

Great thread, lots of helpful info. I am looking for membership software that is also a listing portal. Members who join can browse and respond to listings for free but members who wish to post their listings must pay to do so. Can anyone recommend appropriate software that could do this? Much thanks!

Comment by JP Medved on July 1, 2015 at 12:09 pm

Hi Jack J,

What types of listings are you looking for? Personals listings? You may want to get a dedicated social network or dating site software if that’s the case, as they often have built in payment walls for viewing listings.

Comment by Julia Sibley on July 23, 2015 at 1:56 pm

Thanks for all the article and responding to comments. I’m looking for a system that can help me track planned giving current and prospective donors. The church database doesn’t have this capability, and I’m just working with a small subset of the membership anyway. I’ve never used software like this and want to find something easy to use that can help me keep up with client relationships. Any ideas? Thank you so much.

Comment by JP Medved on July 27, 2015 at 12:13 pm

Hi Julia,

It may not be free, but have you considered dedicated Donation Management software?

I am looking for a free (or very inexpensive) membership application for maintaining the membership database with various membership types, sending annual dues notices and processing dues payments. Any other functionality would be a bonus but not necessary. Our current membership is approximately 400 members. Any suggestions?

Comment by Misha Benoit on August 9, 2015 at 10:31 pm

Do you realize that none of these are now free???? Do you have an updated article with actual free ones??

Comment by JP Medved on August 10, 2015 at 12:28 pm

Misha,

Thanks for the comment, we will be updating this post with new solutions and comparisons shortly!

Comment by Karen Sai on September 16, 2015 at 9:58 am

Thank you for this. It was all (including the comments) very helpful. I am the Exec Director of a network of African philanthropic organizations. At this point we have just above 60 members.
I am looking for a management system that will allow me to grow this network. (Current target is 200 members in the next 12 months). A free management software would be ideal as it would allow us to keep costs down. I am concerned though that we may not get the technical support we need. I would like to manage communication to and between members, dues collection, and perhaps four regional events and a continental event each year.
Has anyone used any of the softwares on this page? If so could you give me an idea of how robust they are and how comprehensive support has been.
Thanks again for this very useful information.
Best,
Karen Sai

Comment by Ed Schipul on September 19, 2015 at 9:36 pm

@misha @JP Medved – Just to clarify, Tendenci has evolved since this was first published and *all* core modules and add-ons needed to run an association or organization is open source NOW. We have seen numerous installs with over 100,000 users or more – hardware is your only limit. Tendenci is completely free and available for download open source. Yes really.

We encourage you to join the community on github and help us make the 7.1 release even better! As far as I know, we are the only completely open source association management system. We have work to do, like simplifying install, making an open-source image for AWS and other hosting providers. But the comment above that there are core modules that you need that require payment is not correct. Tendenci is free and open source GPL software 100%.

For the skeptics out there, yes of course we build custom modules for clients that request them. And we do large scale deployments as security and optimization can become a challenge. Yet other companies can do this as well. And for 90% of Tendenci users, which is now in 30 languages, that type of scale isn’t an issue and they can self-deploy with the help of a local programmer in their community. So do it!

One company that I frequently refer people to if our team isn’t a good fit is https://bixly.com/ . They have lots of experience with Tendenci and they are great people.

We’d actually rather see you self deploy and join the community of social change makers who realize that proprietary solutions are not the future. That free and open source software, and especially Python applications (Tendenci is 100% Python) over PHP or ASPX apps will match the skills of the next generation of college graduates and volunteers.

Comment by JP Medved on September 21, 2015 at 2:56 pm

Karen Sai, you might consider Memberplanet from this list, as they are free up to 200 members. Several of the open source options also have, as Ed mentions above, companies that support them if you’re worried about that being an issue.

Comment by Agnes Johnson on September 24, 2015 at 8:47 am

I’m working on creating a database for our church that must include the various groups that parishioners belong to within the church. Our ideal database will have all personal details, occupation, and groups and have the capacity to extract for example, members of a particular group within the church, number of children, certain professions, payment of dues, etc from the main database. I tried using Excel but not being an advanced user, couldn’t make a good headway. Is there an inexpensive and simple way to create this type of database please?

I am working w/ a volleyball club that has 200+ members and am in desperate need of a software program that can help manage all of this. I am searching for:

1) A member portal for parents to log in, update their contact info & see payment history.

2) Some parents have 2+ kids playing so I need the option to have one ‘umbrella’ profile w/ 1+ members.

3) Payments: I receive full, partial, and random amounts towards tuition, so people will need the option to manually input what amount they want to pay (especially for divorced couple who split costs 50/50). There are discounts, scholarships, and deals to be applied so I need auto fixed amounts but also the ability to manually amend amounts within a specific profile. And I need the ability to add offline payments and have it applied to the total due, for those who pay via check. And, finally, it has to be compatible with QBO.

Used Spikenite previously and everybody hated it. Right now I am using Sport Ngin and am continuously encountering issues with their system, which is doubling my workload (i.e. I hate it). I checked with Wild Apricot and, unfortunately, they don’t have enough payment option flexibility available right now. MemberPlanet is next on the list but I am not quite convinced yet…. Help please! Not looking for free – just inexpensive.

Thank you!!
C

Comment by Terry Ross on December 12, 2015 at 7:53 pm

To Ed Schipul@Tendenci:

I’ve been at this, searching for weeks and I thank Capterra for pulling so much information together in one place. But the above Ed Schipul comment of Sept. 19, 2015, is the single most important statement found to date. You might want to print this one. I will bronze it.
I am enough of an open source guy to appreciate what “Tendenci” has done here.
Not only does it appear all the doors are unlocked, but you have gone miles to make it configurable by individuals with a very minimal skill set. Even “Windows only” dweebs can do this dance.
The above statements about hidden and increased costs in the some 200 plus platforms represented here in Capterra, is essentially true. That leaves you in the unenviable “what’s the catch” position. A little company I know, called IBM (the worlds largest software vendor) gives away the software and makes their living on support.
I your case, you have learned that most people want “free” but others insist on paying you. They are almost always the big clients who can afford it. Your support of the non-profit community brings you both big clients and the support of the “open source” community. I hope they fully embrace you; which will keep you “bleeding edge” and as “Enterprise” as some of the most outrageously priced products in this market.
And finally a somewhat harsh reality statement to those reading this.
If your software support, amateur or professional, is a “windows only guy”;
They are in this day and age, a liability. I am involved in several non-profit organizations and “open source guys are all around me. Of course they do Windows too. Who doesn’t !

Tillsonburg Scout Association

Comment by JP Medved on December 15, 2015 at 11:37 am

Hi CL,

Have you tried reaching out to our Capterra advisors to talk through your needs? We can do a quick 10 min call to get you matched up with the perfect fit (totally free):

[…] way to organize the memberships… online app? Aysia suggested checking out this review: http://blog.capterra.com/top-7-free-open-source-membership-management-software-products/. Samantha brought up the question of security and information sharing with external […]

Comment by Pam K on February 11, 2016 at 6:58 am

Is there any recommendations for a trade chamber where the membership is offered to companies not individuals?

Comment by Jon on March 2, 2016 at 3:01 pm

I want to throw Zenbership into the mix here. Zenbership (www.zenbership.com) is free open source software with all of the bells and whistles of the commercial alternatives. It features event planning, a CRM, a CMS, invoicing, subscription management, a shopping cart, e-mail campaigns, secure content delivery and so much more!

Comment by Stephen Adeyemo on March 4, 2016 at 4:46 am

Looking for software for an Organization that coordinates other similar organizations within the artisan community.
A desktop application to be used by member bodies to collate their membership data is needed to populate our master database to be hosted online. Any ideas on software that will achieve this purpose, I’m at my wits ends.
Don’t have a website yet.

We will be soon starting our membership and donation campaign. Looking for a maximum of 1000 members over 3 years. Looking for something which has both and a payment gateway and sinks with quick books.

Comment by Tejshvi on April 12, 2016 at 3:01 am

I am looking for a software which is free or low cost and can be used for
– memberships and donations
– works in India
– sinks with quick books.

Grouper is an enterprise access management system designed for the highly distributed management environment and heterogeneous information technology environment common to Universities.

Comment by Prajitno on June 11, 2016 at 7:54 pm

Hello I’m looking open source members management software or paid that can be place in our own server that has chat feature
Thanks

Comment by Miss KINOVA on June 17, 2016 at 12:56 am

Hey …….

thanks everyone for your splendid work and with all the information about some different software that brings a difference in our society.
We really appreciate your effort and this platform.

well I’m a Secretary of a very small non profit organisation that has just started from the early February this year.
And I’m looking for a free app or software that can help us to create our logo as an organisation and some paperwork to keep the working process smooth ( i.e for events, campaign or other sort of perm flat ).

it must be able to run even in Southern Africa in terms of net work

Comment by Kirsty Sanders on June 22, 2016 at 9:53 am

Re GroupSpaces, mentioned in above article. Take my advice and stay away from it! When we first used it (before the originators sold it a year or so ago), it was fine and customer support was ok. Now, there is NO customer support; no phone number; no help desk and all emails go unanswered! To top it off, it is now bouncing all emails sent to particular addresses, e.g. ‘hotmail’, so we have no way of communicating with all our members.

Comment by Veronica James on July 13, 2016 at 10:17 pm

Hiya, can you comment at all on the security on any of these? We are a small non-profit and have a membership that needs to be kept very private and could have safety implications for members if it were hacked. Does this mean that we would need to go with the costly databases?

[…] But before choosing any membership management software you should be aware of the features of a great membership management software. […]

Comment by Milan Vuk Stankovic on September 11, 2016 at 11:39 am

Hey Leah,

I’ve got one more:
GumRoad.com
it may not be the best platform in this world, but I like it and find it very useful (at least for now).

Best regards,
Milan

Comment by Alex on September 20, 2016 at 2:53 pm

Hi.

I represent a white label solution provider for the sports industry. We would be interested to explore the possibility of creating a professional white label management platform, do you think there would be a market for something like this?

Thanks!

Comment by Gercek Karakus on October 5, 2016 at 6:26 pm

Hi everyone,

I’m the co-founder of Raklet and we’re building the world’s leading online community management platform. You can manage your members, donors and any sort of contacts on our platform. It’s free up to 1000 contacts as we’d like to support small organizations. It’s still affordable if you have less than 2,500 contacts which is only $79/month.